1 The Cult(ure) of the customer By: Paul Du Gay & Graeme Salaman Book 1, Section 4, Chapter 14 Section 4: Societal context

2 Close to the customer Customer focus is a modern concept in understanding organizational change. Environment is putting pressure on organizations to find new ways of enhancing their competitiveness e.g. foreign products demanding customers, product differentiation, new technologies and demand fragmentation.

3 Close to the customer … (continuo) This causes restructuring to face market instability and sophisticated innovative customers. These customers are part of modern organization ’ s life with the following implications: 1. Work will be restructured in a way resembles the relationships between the organization and its customers 2. Customers choice is regarded of high importance in work structure and even total change in the organization. 3. Internal departmental and employees relationship are managed as if they were suppliers and customers. Customers then are treated as managers.

4 Close to the customer … (continuo) Consequently, instead of traditional bureaucratic structures, now we have sovereign consumers concept of structuring based upon enterprise culture and commercial models. Organizational change, then goes in the direction of replacing hierarchical control with simulated market control. Divisions areas becoming quasi-firms with suppliers-customers relationship or even competing with each other. i.e. business units, profit centers with decentralized management to meet local needs and performance targets with focus on its own goals within central context and policy. Even in the public sector this concept was applied though environment policy and legislations. This makes the interesting picture of imposing market values by formal centralized and brecciate pressure.

5 Close to the customer … (continuo) Furthermore, customer focus has changed work structure to allow for flexibility and compatible practices e.g. TQM + JIT require redefinition of the relationship between workers in terms of being each other ’ s customer. In organization with high interactive relationships between employees and customers, structures are built in a way allows customers to have the role of management. Since customer satisfaction and relation is a measure of competitive success and quality is defined as given the customer what they want, and bureaucratic management will not be appropriate But, employees behavior to cope with customers focus is not achieved through change of structure and control but rather through building a culture change in order to change attitude and behavior. Through elaborate customer feedback this culture can be built without destroying the required behavior.

6 Enterprising Cult(ure) of the customer The market language will replace civic language and enterprising sovereign consumers. This concept and language have swept all public service enterprise in the U.K (e.g. schools, hospitals, universities). Therefore, patients, parents, students, passengers = customers. Organizations accepted this move not as oppressing but rather as a contribution to serve a human being which the center of enterprise world. Remodeling enterprises and social relations in the public domain through reforming programs and technologies for a better internal world in the enterprise.

7 Enterprising Enterprises Business enterprises are striving to stay close to the customer though business improvement. It is struggling to stay enterprising. This is to respond to “ total consumer responsiveness ” which is required in modern globalize capitalism. There is no longer a stable ground for business objectives, but a rum in a “ Chaotic ” global economy through redesigning the organization around the figure of the consumer. You are a sailor only if you stand the blowing wind of your customers.

8 Enterprising Enterprises … (continuo) The result is the use of: 1. New technologies and practices 2. Techniques for reducing dependency through reorganizing 3. Cutting internal boundaries (Teams) 4. Encouraging internal competition 5. Individualization of accountability and responsibility. The Result: Customers satisfaction is achieved, quality assured, innovation festered, and flexibility guaranteed though the active engagement of the self fulfilling impulses of all organization ’ s members

9 Enterprising Enterprises … (continuo) The no-win bureaucracy is replaced with the win/win active development of flexible creative and organic entrepreneurialism. i.e. staying close to the customers means gaining productivity through people. Empowering people to add value to the enterprise and to themselves, though total responsibility for results. To create the feeling of control over their lives. Regardless of their position they should feel that their role is vital to the enterprise and to them.

10 Enterprising Enterprises … (continuo) If anyone has: A way to live for … he, can bear almost any how … Therefore, the enterprising firm is the one that engages in controlled de-control. The key to loose/tight is culture. Through effective management of meanings, beliefs and values to enhance connective to total objective while being totally free. This is achieved through autonomous self regulating productive, responsible individuals.

11 The Discourse of Enterprise Though there was some connection between Mrs Tatcher and the call of enterprising in the UK, it is still important to show the connection to globalization. This task of creating an “ enterprise culture ” has involved a series of reconstructions in business firms with a focus on customers. This culture was not based on civil rights but on market choices exercised by customers. This culture will shape behaviors and values in order to achieve social and business goals This way enterprise has operated on changing the world, rewriting the language, redefining the relation between the public and the private for crating new identities.

12 The Discourse of Enterprise … (continuo) The success of neo-liberalism in the UK with its flagship image of an enterprise culture, ‘ operates within a much more general transformation in “ mentalities of government ”, which the autonomous, free, choosing self … has become spectrum ’ (Rose, 1989). The language of enterprise has established an affinity between the politico-ethical objectives of neo-liberal government in the UK, the economic objectives of contemporary business, and the self-actualizing, self- regulating capacities of human subjects.